


Duty & Consequence

by Jewels (bjewelled)



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-12
Updated: 2014-05-12
Packaged: 2018-01-24 13:17:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1606526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bjewelled/pseuds/Jewels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They have a crashed ship, and a duty.  Set just prior to season 11.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Duty & Consequence

"I don't have nightmares," Washington told him.

Tucker looked up from the dismembered remains of his rifle. The whole trigger assembly had jammed, locking half open and rendering the gun unusable. The easiest way to deal with the fault would have been to ditch the weapon and retrieve a working one from the remains of the crashed ship's armoury, but Tucker was going crazier by the day with nothing to do apart from running endless drills and for some reason fixing the problem himself had seemed like a good idea.

He'd just finished taking the rifle apart when Wash had come over, apparently fed up with trying to fix the radio, and watching him in silence for a while. In truth, Tucker had forgotten his presence, occupied as he was with cleaning the components, a fiddly task made awkward in battle armour, but it was one that he could do with his eyes shut.

"No kidding," Tucker said, "I would have figured everything in your head would have you screaming like a lunatic every night."

"Nightmares were never my problem. Full on hallucinations, maybe, with the occasional conversation with people who weren't there, but I never remembered my dreams."

Tucker glanced up from spraying oil on rifle components. "And they let you back in the field?"

Wash shrugged, the motion swallowed by his armour. "Antipsychotics are a marvellous invention."

"We don't have any."

"I stopped needing them a long time ago," Wash said, with an exasperated sigh.

"Says you. If you'd brought any, I'd be telling you to share. Fuck if we don't all need meds around here." There was something almost meditatively relaxing about going through the motions that had been so thoroughly drilled into him all those years ago in basic, so he sounded slightly less than completely murderous when he added, "Is there a point to you telling me this, or is caring and sharing a thing they teach you in freelancer school?"

Wash was silent, his head turned away from Tucker and towards the ship. "Caboose is having nightmares."

"Oh." Tucker thought about that for a moment, and let himself be distracted by cleaning. When it became clear that Wash wasn't going to say anything, he said, "I don't have a clue what to do about that."

Wash sighed, ever so slightly. "Neither do I."

Tucker found the problem. The native soil seemed to be made up of a weird granular silicate that had managed to work its way into the rifle's inner workings in spite of the fact that they should have been sealed. Tucker stared at the trigger assembly before deciding he could get it working again, but he should probably double check the make sure they had working replacements on the ship. Or con Wash into checking. He'd probably dig doing something like inventory.

Not that there was anything around here he needed to shoot. Except maybe Caboose, Wash or the Reds.

"Probably the pain meds screwing with him," Tucker said. Caboose had broken his arm in the crash, and whilst there'd been enough left in the infirmary to set the bone and accelerate the regrowth, it still hurt like a bitch, and they'd been feeding Caboose painkillers by telling him they were skittles. "He'll be fine when they wear off."

Wash grunted.

The gritty soil, more granular than the stuff they'd had back in Blood Gulch, seemed to have gotten into every part of the weapon. Tucker cleaned the components, checked them again, and then started to put them back together. It really was too much like actual work, but it wasn't like they had a local nightlife.

"You're not bad at that," Wash commented, as he watched Tucker work.

Tucker rolled the prefire chamber in his hand. He glanced down at it and used his HUD to increase the magnification on his field of view. It revealed there wasn't anything obviously wrong with the unit. They rarely, but occasionally cracked, and he wouldn't have been surprised given that it had gone through a crash landing not too long ago. He slid it back into position and continued to reassemble the rifle.

"You'd better not be thinking of asking me to clean your gun."

"Like I'd let you touch my weapon."

Tucker opened his mouth to make a crass joke, and then very quickly thought better of it.

"We need to finish clearing the ship," Wash said, as Tucker slid the last of the rifle components together.

"Fuck." Wash had waited until Tucker was finished and didn't have any excuse to procrastinate.

"Tucker-"

"Shut up, I know. I said I'd finish, didn't I? Doesn't mean I'd have to like it."

Wash snorted and rolled his shoulders. "Tucker, I'd be worried if you did."

Tucker stood and raised his rifle, and shot at the signage on a torn off piece of bulkhead fifty feet away. It left a lot of carbon scoring and a loud bang and meant the rifle was, probably, the most functional object on this rock.

**

The Reds and Blues has survived the transport ship's crash by virtue of being forced bodily into escape pods by the crew of ship. Tucker's last recollection of the crew was being shoved past a hatch that was quickly sealed by an ensign. When they'd landed, and made their way to the crash site, easy to pinpoint with the rising column of smoke, they'd made their way inside and discovered two things.

Firstly, that for some reason that they hadn't been able to determine (the ship's black box having been lost and providing no clue as to its whereabouts), none of the crew had made it to the remaining pods. Secondly, all the ship's systems, including inertial cancelling, had been offline during their descent.

"They would have been going in excess of two hundred g when they hit the ground," Wash had said, with remarkable dispassion, when they came across the first of the bodies, or rather, what was left of the bodies. "They didn't stand a chance."

Grif had marched away silently, and Tucker had heard distant noises that were almost certainly Simmons vomiting discretely into a nearby bush. The Human body could take a lot, but hundreds of pounds of force per square inch wasn't really in the design specs.

They'd all agreed they needed to clear the bodies. A ship full of corpses would go really bad, really quickly, but they'd also all decided by some unspoken agreement that Caboose could stay outside 'keeping an eye out'. It seemed wrong to expose him to the ugly truth that some of the crew had to be quite literally scraped off the deck.

That was when both the Reds and Blues had decided that building shelter outside the ship was far more important than trying to use the interior.

They'd reached deck eight, the last of the decks that were even slightly accessible, and the end of their self-appointed task. The Reds took the port side. Wash and Tucker took the starboard. It was a job that had, over time, become easier. The hardest decks had been the engineering section, which was flooded with radiation, and all they could do was race in to check for bodies before hurriedly sealing off the whole thing and being thankful they all had shielded armour, and the command deck, which as befitted a time of emergency, had been full of crew. It had taken them a day and a half just to clear the control centre.

The hangar decks had probably had more than a few crewmen, if they'd tried to evacuate some other way than the pods, but that deck had been utterly demolished in the crash. Anyone down there was staying there.

The deck they were finishing with was mostly crew quarters, which should have been empty during a ship-wide emergency. That didn't stop them from finding someone, a man who had been halfway into his armour, having apparently slept through everything but the evacuation alarm, in the third room they tried.

Wash fiddled with the chestpiece of the lieutenant's armour, and eventually straightened, an ID chip in his fingers. The tag went into the utility slot at the small of his back, along with the other tags they'd pulled from the crew. Wash had half, Sarge had the other. There was no one to give them to, no way to report the deaths to the UNSC, but at least if (when, Tucker reminded himself, _when_ ) they got picked up, they'd be able to give the tags to someone who knew what to do with them.

Tucker mentally noted the room they'd found him in. They'd finish going through the deck, see how many they found, and then they'd move them to the cargo bay they'd chosen to store the crew in, chosen because there was just enough power trickling from the engines to hermetically seal the bay and it was intact enough to pump the air out and vacuum-preserve the bodies. Sarge had made the modifications to give them enough power to do both with remarkable speed.

The alternative had been burning the bodies, and Tucker wasn't sure how Caboose would have taken that.

Caboose. Right.

"Have you seen any wild animals about?" Tucker asked, as they made their way down the hallway, opening doors through brute force rather than the inset panels next to them on the walls. Fortunately, these doors weren't designed to seal in an emergency, but to unlock, and it was relatively easy.

"Hmm? What? No."

"Just thinking," Tucker said mildly, applying a bit more force to a door that had been unseated during the crash and come free from its runners. "If we'd been on board, there'd be no one to do this. Wild animals would have gotten in. But I've not seen any wild animals."

"Maybe this planet doesn't have much in the way of large predators."

"I've seen birds. Maybe they have vultures."

"Pleasant thought."

The quarters were thankfully empty, and devoid of most personal touches, except for a cushion that didn't look standard issue. When Tucker lifted it up so that his helmet lights could illuminate it, it revealed itself to be an embroidered pillow, the stitches looked to have been hand-made, obviously a possession from someone's civvie life. It was an embroidery of a flower, a red one, and in the corner was stitched, "To Audrey" with no other note.

Tucker hurriedly set the pillow down on the bed, though carefully, so as not to damage it. Audrey had been the name of the first shift pilot, he remember, dully. Audrey Henderson, flight lieutenant. She'd laughed at one of his jokes, and they'd found her impaled by the shattered remnants of the helm.

Tucker moved on, wanting to just be _done_ with it all. He found Wash three doors down holding a book, an actual paper _book_ , that had obviously belonged to the owner of the quarters, carefully looking through it using a fingertip to turn the pages. Anything more forceful would probably have torn the book in half, given the power assists of combat armour.

Wash glanced up, though his helmet obscured his expression and Tucker had no idea if the gesture was a guilty one or not, and folded the book closed.

"Anything good?" Tucker asked, with forced lightness. "I'll even take War and Peace I'm so fucking starved of entertainment."

"It was in Polish," Wash said, "I think."

Figured.

They found two more bodies during their sweep. One was more or less intact, but the other had been bisected.

"It probably happened after they were already dead," Wash said, when Tucker's vision greyed, and he had to put a hand to the wall to keep himself upright in a moment of humiliating weakness. "Not enough blood."

At first, Tucker had snarled and snapped at Wash for his lack of reaction to the plethora of bodies. Wash had just tightened his grip on his rifle and let Tucker vent at him. Later he realised that Wash didn't hold Tucker's anger against him, and that pissed him off all the more.

"The war?" he'd eventually asked, when the stoicism finally got to him. "Is that where you've seen the shit that apparently makes you immune to... to... _this_?"

Wash had seemed like he wasn't going to respond, but then he'd shrugged, pretending nonchalance. "Before I joined Freelancer," he said, the words clipped, disjointed, as if they were distasteful things that Wash didn't want lingering in his mouth, "Disaster recovery on worlds usually just before the the aliens managed to glass the surface. It's worse when it's done by... living things, and not something like a crash."

Tucker had tested low and been shoved into what he now knew was Project Freelancer's personal meat grinder. It hadn't been until much later that anything approaching normally military action had happened to him, and even then it wasn't like he'd seen frontline combat.

"Is that why you joined Freelancer?" Tucker asked, genuinely curious and forgetting for a moment that Wash was, on his good days, a little _twitchy_ about Freelancer and his time there.

Wash surprised him by answering, though. "I joined because they handed me an assignment card and said 'report at oh nine hundred'. Soldiers don't question orders, Tucker."

"Yeah, and look where that got you," Tucker had sneered, which had finally been enough to send Wash away, who'd left under the pretext of digging out some communications gear to send a distress call.

They carried the bodies, one at a time, because they had no way to move them other than with their own hands, up through the decks to the cargo bay. Tucker sealed his armour and let the internal air supplies take over. They hadn't sealed and depressurised the bay yet, waiting until they'd finished retrieving the crew, and by this point the smell would be unbearable. He carefully didn't look around himself as they set down their burden on the nearest available bit of floor space. He knew what he'd see: ranks of bodies in various states, covered with whatever sheets and tarps and bits of insulation that they could find.

When they brought the third and final body back, the Reds were outside the cargo bay, waiting for them.

"Is that... body... cut in half?" Simmons asked, sounding pale.

Tucker felt too tired to even make a sarcastic joke about Simmons' observational skills. He just took the remains into the bay, and was glad when Wash did the same, and they could leave and seal the door behind them.

"Did you-"

Grif shook his head. "Just the one, thank fuck."

"There." There was a distant thunk, and the sound of rushing air. Sarge finished messing with the bay's access panel. "Done."

Tucker didn't unseal his armour. The smell was probably in the corridor. He'd wait until he was outside, and any lingering scents had enough time to clear. "Let's get the fuck out of here then."

**

A crashed spaceship was a shitty tomb, Tucker thought, as he lay on the grass looking upwards at the shattered remnants of the craft.

Wash came over and kicked him in the side. Not hard, but enough to get his attention. "Get up."

Tucker tried to slap Wash's foot away, but the ex-agent was too quick, and kicked him again. "Fuck off. I've earned the right to do fuck all for the rest of the day."

"You did two things today."

"One of which was going corpse hunting, so you'll understand if I tell you, with the deepest sincerity to fuck. off."

Wash kicked him again, but it was more desultory, half-hearted, more of a tap than anything. "You swear too much."

"You don't swear enough."

"Does it help?"

Tucker scowled, even though Wash couldn't see him. "What?"

"The swearing. Does it help?"

Tucker sniffed. "It's a good all-purpose word. I fuck, you fuck, he or she fucks. Get fucked. Go fuck yourself-"

Wash snorted, interrupting him. "I should have known that your swearing is a way to avoid linguistic effort."

"Fuckin A."

There was a soft rustling, and then Washington was sitting down on the grass next to him, rifle set aside (though easily within reach). "Don't tell me the great Agent Washington is actually doing something as Human as taking a break?"

Wash didn't take the bait, and they sat in silence for a moment. A bird crossed Tucker's field of vision, cutting across the sky somewhere high above, and he wondered if it was a vulture, or a really big sparrow. He remembered seeing a bird on one planet that was more like a velociraptor with wings that spat fluorine. The locals had used anti-aircraft guns to keep them away from settlements not because they would attack anyone, but because the fluorine would corrode the building materials they used to construct houses. The Sangheili he'd been with had thought they looked appetising, but he wasn't sure how much of that wasn't just 'fucking with the human'.

"They made sure we got to the escape pods before they did," he said.

Wash made a noise of acknowledgement.

"Waiting too long killed them."

"Mm," again.

"Fucking idiots."

"They did their duty, Tucker."

"Look where it got 'em." Tucker glanced at Wash. The helmet's visor protecting his eyes from the sun that shone brightly, polarising and casting Wash's silhouette into eerie greys. "Look where it got you."

"Stuck with you."

"For a start."

Wash stabbed a finger in the direction of the ship. "That was a duty, you know. Taking care of the dead. You think that's a waste of time?"

"That's different."

Wash sighed, and for an instant, Tucker got the feeling that Wash was trying to tell him something, but the moment passed almost immediately, and Wash was getting to his feet, collecting his rifle as he went and stowing it on his back. "Break's over," he said, "Caboose made lunch, and then we're running drills."

"You let _Caboose_ cook?"

"I let Caboose pick unopened MREs out of a box, I'm not crazy."

"Fuckin' debatable." Tucker got up. "And I'm not running any goddamn drills."

"Yes you are." Wash glanced over towards their little shanty shack of an encampment. "Do you smell smoke?"

\- end -


End file.
